I second this recommendation, actually even if you do not program in Java nor on the JVM. Like no other book it taught me a particular kind of foresight - to an

I second this recommendation, actually even if you do not program in Java nor on the JVM. Like no other book it taught me a particular kind of foresight - to analyse the consequences of each small decision being made during implementing some new thing and to design things in such a way that they are least likely to cause problems now or in the future, to me or to other programmers working on the project - my code is much more solid and less error-prone ever since and it was definitely a big AHA moment for me. The author, Joshua Bloch, designed some of the standard Java APIs and I actually can't think of a better way to learn about those things than implementing an API used by other people, which explains why he has so many interesting things to say that are seldom found in other places. Here is also a very nice talk by the author: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/effective-api-design http://www.infoq.com/presentations/effective-api-design